We turned into an elevator and told the girl, “Fifteen.” She punched a button and waited for it to fill up. She didn’t seem to be pregnant. I wondered what was the matter with her.

I’d managed to get a good grip on my heaving imagination, when I got a look at the shoulder patches the other passengers were wearing. That almost did for me right there. It was a circular red patch with the black letters TAF superimposed on a white G-4. TAF for Terrestrial Armed Forces, of course: the letters were the basic insignia of all rear-echelon outfits. But why didn’t they use G-1, which represented Personnel? G-4 stood for the Supply Division. Supply!

You can always trust the TAF. Thousands of morale specialists in all kinds of ranks, working their educated heads off to keep up the spirits of the men in the fighting perimeters—but every damn time, when it comes down to scratch, the good old dependable TAF will pick the ugliest name, the one in the worst possible taste.

Oh, sure, I told myself, you can’t fight a shattering, no-quarter interstellar war for twenty-five years and keep every pretty thought dewy-damp and intact, But not Supply, gentlemen. Not this place—not the Junkyard. Let’s at least try to keep up appearances.

Then we began going up and the elevator girl began announcing floors and I had lots of other things to think about.

“Third floor—Corpse Reception and Classification,” the operator sang out.

“Fifth floor—Preliminary Organ Processing.”

“Seventh floor—Brain Reconstitution and Neural Alignment.”

“Ninth floor—Cosmetics, Elementary Reflexes, and Muscular Control.”

At this point, I forced myself to stop listening, the way you do when you’re on a heavy cruiser, say, and the rear engine room gets flicked by a bolt from an Eoti scrambler.